Microsoft mercy killing Windows 7 by banning it from latest Kaby Lake and Ryzen processors
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Microsoft has made true on their earlier promise to not support the popular Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 on the latest generation of Intel and AMD processors.
Users who have installed Windows 7 on these brand-new machines have been met by a warning message when trying to use Windows Update, saying:
“Unsupported Hardware […] Your PC uses a processor that isn’t supported on this version of Windows and you won’t receive updates.”
Microsoft has argued that new processors work much better with a new OS, and it did not make sense to update a nearly 10 year old OS to support the latest technology.
With 47% of the world on Windows 7, and given that Windows 10 was given away for free for a year, many are presumably reluctant to change to anything else, and Microsoft is running into the same issues as they experienced with the huge legacy installed base of Windows XP, which even today has 8% market share, 16 years after its release. Windows 7 left mainstream support in January 2015, meaning Microsoft is only liable for security updates to the OS at present.
Microsoft warned users of their plans in January 2016 and again in August 2016, but this has not stopped Windows 7 fans from grousing and threatening to switch to Linux.
It should however be clear now that if you want to use the latest hardware, if you plan to run Windows you should also be using the latest Microsoft software also.
